A while back New York magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote “We All Live on Campus Now,” noting that progressive campus craziness has burst out and now heavily infects big business and the media:
When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.
Sullivan’s piece has apparently re-emerged and has angered the younger staff at New York. His column this week was canceled.
But that’s nothing compared to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has cashiered its editor Stan Wischnowski for the sin of approving a headline reading “Buildings Matter, Too.” Groveling didn’t work:
The day after the headline ran Wischnowski and senior editors posted an apology on the paper’s website, calling it “offensive” and saying it never should have run.
“The headline accompanied a story on the future of Philadelphia’s buildings and civic infrastructure in the aftermath of this week’s protests,” the apology said. “The headline offensively riffed on the Black Lives Matter movement and suggested an equivalence between the loss of buildings and the lives of black Americans. That is unacceptable.”
About 30 members of the Inquirer’s 210-member editorial staff called in sick earlier this week, and black staff members angrily condemned the headline.
It appeared over an article by architecture critic Inga Saffron, who worried that buildings damaged in violence over the past week could “leave a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia.”
The Inquirer drew fresh scorn after the headline was replaced online with one that read, “Black Lives Matter. Do Buildings?” Eventually, the newspaper settled on “Damaging buildings disproportionately hurt the people protesters are trying to uplift.”
That was just a warmup for the woke mob. Late Sunday afternoon New York Times opinion editor James Bennet “resigned,” though I think it is safe to assume he was pushed out. As you know, the Times‘s in-house wokerati threw a temper tantrum when the op-ed page printed an article from Tom Cotton calling for the use of federal troops to quell rioting—a position that most polls show commands majority support from the public. I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised at this: Democrats reacted furiously when President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas to enforce school integration and prevent the Democrats’ anti-black violence back in the 1950s, so I guess you could say there’s a rough consistency here.
The Times bent over backwards to disavow the Cotton op-ed, attaching a shameful disclaimer to the online version, and cowardly blaming its appearance on a young editor who just happens to have worked once for the Weekly Standard (so you can expect he’s toast). Supposedly the Cotton op-ed caused a flood of canceled subscriptions—another win for Tom! The big question now is whether the Times will keep on the semi-conservative writers and editors that Bennet recruited, such as Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens. Just because Bari and Bret are anti-Trump likely offers no protection from the woke mob.
Meanwhile, let us celebrate Tom Cotton’s great week caused the Times to descend into Maoist madness and lose subscribers to boot.
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